More than hot air on airbags

There was a death in the family at Honda Australia last year.

When the driver of a Honda CR-V was killed in Sydney in June 2017 by a faulty Takata airbag there was grief and suffering for their real relatives, but also in Melbourne with their surprising extended family.

There are more than two dozen people working every day on the Takata recall and they did everything they could to save the Sydney victim from themselves.

There were letters, emails and telephone calls.

“We had sent, in total, five separate letters,” recalls the director of Honda Australia, Stephen Collins.

He is still sad about the failure to save a life, and he is not alone.

“Personally, I was devastated. And the company was too. We’d made a real effort to avoid that situation,” says Collins.

Collins’ emotion is clear. And it’s not just about the fatality. There is also pent-up frustration about the reluctance of some drivers and owners to act on the Takata threat despite all the commitment and a bill that’s currently running on the far side of $50 million.

“For several years we’d really committed ourselves to do 100 per cent. When the news came through we were devastated. We called the whole company together and I told everyone personally,” Collins explained.

“We knew there had been deaths, in the USA and a number in Malaysia, but we were definitely shocked.”

Honda Australia has become the touchstone for the Takata disaster in Australia, just as Volkswagen will be forever linked with emissions cheating.

There is some parallel between the situations, since both were well beyond the reach or understanding of anyone involved with the companies in Australia.

But, where Volkswagen (globally) went into denial, Honda hit the Go! button and that was translated into action in Australia.

Toyota might have more vehicles on the recall list, but Honda (which has 436,000 involving 661,000 inflators across 21 separate recalls) sits at the heart of Takata Down Under.

“I’m not sure we are being blamed. After all, it’s a Takata issue. It’s not just us,” says Collins.

“We’re not playing the blame game. At the end of the day these were faulty inflators and we just want to get the job done.”

Honda has the dedicated call centre with those 20 staff, access to translators in 160 different languages, and is still chasing hard to finalise recall work on the last 10 per cent of its affected vehicles.

“The last 60,000 inflators are the tough part. It’s 44,000 cars. It’s really challenging,” says Collins.

“We either don’t know who owns the cars or we’ve made many, many multiple contacts and for whatever reason that person hasn’t come in.

“Our aim is to get every single one. We’ll work for as long as it takes.

“In reality it might be hard.”

There are some surprising successes, like the 2001 Honda Accord that was tracked through New Zealand all the way to Croatia. The car’s airbag was replaced, and it was job done, something that still brings smiles to the Honda staff.

But the Honda experience is a lesson for the other brands which are only just getting started on Takata following intervention by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

In Australia, a total of four million vehicles from 25 manufacturers are now involved in what has become a mandatory recall enforced by the ACCC. Many are barely getting started, particularly measured against the Honda effort that tracks back to 2015.

But the scale of the Takata disaster is hard to appreciate, even when you break it down.

“At the maximum we were doing 8000 inflators a week — in the middle of last year, not long after the incident in Sydney. We’ve got 107 dealers, so you can crunch the numbers,” says Collins.

Sometimes that meant an extra 100 cars a week at the major dealerships, in addition to their regular service work.

Collins says there are still car brands who have no idea what they need to do, or how to do it.

And it’s easy to hear reports — from friends and families — of people who have faced a three-month wait for an airbag replacement… Or the offer of a Beta bag with a minimal chance of trouble during the wait for a proper Alpha switch.

Looking at Honda, because it has the best track record, getting to a 90 per cent replacement was relatively easy. The final 10 per cent is looking far, far tougher.

“Right now we’re doing about 1000 a week, but as it gets closer to completion we know that number will dwindle. Under the mandator situation we have until 2020 to get them all,” says Collins.

That can mean a replacement, or proof that the car is dead. But tracking cars through four, five or six owners is not proving easy.

And that’s where Honda Australia is banking a surprising win.

It says it’s social media connections are now the best in the industry, helping it to track owners but also finding new ways to connect to them.

“We didn’t know that in some cultures they react to talk of death and serious injuries with denial. They will not act on something that’s presented that way,” says Collins.

“A lot of people thought we were using the recall as a way to sell them something. Some people genuinely believed it was not a serious safety problem. That all means you have to find new ways to present the message. And new ways to get through to people. And we’ve found ways that we can track, almost in real time, the way people are reacting.”

Takata has also taken Honda Australia into a lot of depth on road safety in Australia and it has received some surprisingly bad news from its latest research.

In a survey of 1200 intending car buyers, less than five per cent were familiar with the role of ANCAP in safety ratings and only half knew of autonomous emergency braking [AEB], despite rating auto braking and blind-spot monitoring as essential for their next car.

But airbags, antilock brakes and crumple zones were ‘top of mind’, despite stability control missing a spot on their safety list.

For Honda, the safety take-out is that the message is yet to get through to ordinary Australians and that’s why its newest commitment is to have the full Honda Sensing Suite (forward collision warning, lane departure warning, lane-keep assist, adaptive cruise control and more) fitted to every new model it introduces.

“Where we can get Honda Sensing sooner, perhaps on a mid-life update like the new Odyssey, we will.

“It’s an absolute commitment now,” Collins concluded.